When I started to reply to the comment below on SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER IS A CONSERVATIVE?, I decided my reply was sufficiently amusing (because of a certain comedian) that it deserved to be a post.

Here is the comment (from scout).

I’m having trouble following your reasoning here. Why would Boehner’s “conservatism” (whatever that poor abused term means these days) depend on what Democrats do? (from here)

Who is Boehner most interested in accommodating? Conservatives? No. Those mean, money-grubbing Conservatives pressured that poor man and his fellow RINOs into a position they really did not want to take. Instead of blaming Democrats for shoving Obamacare down our throats, brave Boehner blames Conservatives for decision he made. He cannot even assume responsibility for his own choices. Yet he calls himself a Conservative? If accepting responsibility for our own choices is not a core Conservative value, what is? 🙄

When Conservatives like Senator Ted Cruz asked the House to stand firm and fight Obamacare, why did some Conservatives doubt it would work? We can count votes. I think most of us did not think politicians like Boehner would stand and fight, and eventually the RINOs did cave.

Since Boehner is not a Conservative, I thought he would cave right away. Apparently, he wants to have it both ways. He wants to look like a Conservative, and he wants to blame the “extreme right wing” for his unending string of failures. Thus, Democrats and the corporate mass media praise him. And he’s is still a Conservative? 😆

Boehner reminds me of a certain comedian’s punch line.

If not for the Democrats (the devil), he, Boehner, would be a responsible Conservative (an angelic Republican). As it is, just like a Democrat Boehner gets to spend all the money he wants. The only difference is that he doesn’t vote for tax increases, just deficits.

Perhaps Boehner’s devil is a Democrat with a jobs program for Conservatives. After all, somebody has to pay all his bills. 😆

45 thoughts on “JOHN BOEHNER IS A CONSERVATIVE? — ANSWERING A COMMENT”

My query was directed to your previous post in which you said Boehner would be a conservative if the Dems gave up on “socialism”, were less liberal, etc. etc. I tend to think personal political conservatism (or liberalism, or anarchist syndicalism or any other “ism”) has more to do with the internal values of the holder than it does with what others are doing. If the American Democratic Party became more “conservative” (in ways that you would deem “conservative”), it wouldn’t necessarily change Boehner’s (or your or my) political orientation.

I don’t think Boehner is blaming the “extreme right” for his failures. I think the import of his remarks earlier in the week was to blame them for their failures.

Boehner’s essential argument is that it is easier to give into the devil than it is to resist. Thus, he blames Conservatives for compelling him and other RINOs to resist Obamacare, something they promised to do when they ran for office. Neither you or Boehner ever actually explain where it is that Conservatives failed. Are we to blame for their campaign promises? Other than giving up and accepting ever more bloated and tyrannical government as an unavoidable fact of life, what is it that Conservatives could have done that they should have done?

Reblogged this on The American Post-Standard and commented:
I had this same thought this past week, Some of these rino’s want to call this a compromise, what did conservatives really get out of this deal?

I continue to have syntactical problems following your comment, but, if you;re asking where the people you call “Conservatives” failed, I think the failure alluded to by Boehner was largely tactical. His complaint was that they fomented the disastrous (for the Republican Party and the credibility of conservative causes) government shut-down without any clear view as to how to turn that event into an effective, positive political gain. His particular comment was that he was later told by some of those who had advocated the tactic that they really didn’t expect to prevail. It was just an exercise that made him and them look foolish.

In any event, your original post on this was, I think, prompted by the recent budget compromise. That development is probably best viewed as a very modest measure which has something for everyone in it. However, for the Republicans, one of the key things that they gain is a period of several months spanning the next mid-term elections in which they can concentrate their fire on Obamacare without having to take fire for obstructionist, governance-crippling shutdowns and chaos. On balance, I think they (and Mr. Ryan) got the better of the deal, however modest it is in terms of long-term impact.

Obamacare is not far enough along to have been a flop yet. It may well turn out to be so. We’ll see. If it appears not to be working out well, it can be amended and adjusted if Congress does its duty.

Boehner is not particularly in charge. He holds a position of respect within the Republican majority in the House. But there are two houses and an Executive Branch with veto power. So there are a lot of variables in the equation. What Boehner was saying about the paucity of thought that went into the shutdown is that, after that debacle, even people who advocated it admitted that they didn’t think they could defund Obamacare.

I do agree with you that the current compromise was a victory (although I think it was a very small one) for reasonable people.

Obamacare is not far enough along to have been a flop? Yet? I suppose if you got a case tapeworms you would not consider the tapeworms a failure until you got rid of them. Similarly we still have not eradicated polio. So polio is not a flop yet. And if we continue this idiotic trend of putting government in charge of our healthcare, all kinds of diseases may soon start experiencing great successes.

To spend money both houses of Congress have to authorize and spend the money. To borrow money, both houses of Congress have to authorize borrowing the money. The majority does not want Obamacare. If Boehner and the RINOs (both in the House and the Senate) had just kept their campaign promises, they could have defunded Obamacare. All they had to do is say NO.

It has been none of my business to engage in the usual spirited debate amongst ‘friends, and I use the word loosely, but may I say this response by CT, with emphasis on the t-wrm, was a mighty fine, and nicely dressed rebuke.

I think I would consider the tapeworms successful until I got rid of them.

I don’t think of government being in charge of health care as much as it is an enabler of a private insurance industry that is in charge of health care. Sure, it asserts some standards and requirements here and there, but Obamacare was an affirmative choice to keep a privatized health care system in this country.

The problem with defunding Obamacare is that the Republicans had nothing to replace it with. Once we have a functional alternative in the wings, fire up and ready to go (if we can use that phrase) then, perhaps, we can talk about replacing this fledgling minor modification of the previous dysfunctional system.

Republicans have offer alternative fixes. Some examples include allowing health insurance plans to cross state borders and reducing the cost of malpractice insurance by making the loser pay the winner’s legal cost. In any event, the system that existed before the passage of Obamacare was better than Obamacare. Thus repealing Obamacare is a perfectly reasonable alternative.

Until Obamacare accelerated the breakdown of the system, most people were relatively happy with their health care. Nonetheless, our healthcare system already suffered from too much government. Medicare costs have skyrocketed, and Medicaid is bankrupting state governments.

Obamacare just made too much government worse. When government requires the health insurance industry to insure a preexisting condition, that by definition is no longer insurance. When government forces us to buy a product and rigidly sets the conditions for what we can buy, we no longer have anything that even looks like a free market. What we have is a “privately owned system” that is effectively operated by the government. When government regulation becomes that stringent, we just raise costs. We add another layer of management (government bureaucrats) that exists primarily just to smother private competition under an absurd regulatory infrastructure.

The end result of Obamacare will be a two-tier health care system: one for the rich and one for the poor.

The problem with defunding Obamacare is that the Republicans had nothing to replace it with.

You say the most astounding things. Earlier, you asserted that the Speaker of the House “is not particularly in charge” and implied that this position was merely “a position of respect.” This is a rather badly misfired notion; even leftist Wikipedia (and thus likely to be palatable to you) demonstrates the very substantial control and authority held by the Speaker (not to mention being next in line for the President in the event of loss/disability of Obama and Biden).

Now, you suggest that the Republican plans put forward to address the issue with uninsured citizens is “nothing.” This is, evidently, because Obama and the news media kept up this meme, that there was “nothing” other than Obamacare. The various proposals included pools (essentially, a modest expansion to Medicaid) to address pre-existing conditions as well as free-market expansions. The former isolate that population from the huge majority; the latter provisions provide some of the controls on price that have caused substantial drops in other areas of medical cost.

Instead, we have captive system of Obama-mandated policy design, still state-limited but with a gargantuan juggernaut of Medicaid expansion that has already made the cost curve unrecognizable — and certainly bearing no resemblance to the stunt put forward by the administration and the OMB showing six years of cost but ten years of “revenues-by-shuffling-Medicaid.” By the end of this period, costs were shooting past revenues — but for the overall period, they contrived a “break even” at the expense of Medicaid.

Medicaid was going to be much cheaper, remember? They were going to “contain fraud” (unsuccessful in previous decades of attempts, but what is reality to a waiting agenda?) and anticipated success by simply pulling the money, with the quiet acknowledgment that it would be put back later (the “doc fix”). Instead, we have decades’-worth of Medicaid expansion happening in a single year, blowing all estimates. Obamacare has already failed, and the website is simply a visible channel marker of bureaucratic incompetence that anyone could understand.

But you don’t, do you? You think that Obamacare has not yet been shown to be “a flop.”

I will give you this: If the real purpose of Obamacare was to collapse the system and force the US into a single payer system by dint of having no other choice, then it is succeeding well — as bad as this idea is. We will wind up with a health care system that is like an American leftist’s version of Europe: Even more gigantic waste and bureaucracy than Europeans have learned to deal with. It is bad enough there, of course: In Spain, unlike the US, uninsured persons are simply turned away from the emergency rooms to die. That does not happen in the United States.

You say a lot, Keith, and I’m eager for beddy-bye time, so I’ll do a bit of cherry-picking here: There is no one “European” system. There is a lot of variation from country to country. Some of those systems have, like ours, a considerable private insurance component. There are about a half-dozen countries in Europe or Scandinavia that I would be as comfortable having a hypothetical health crisis in as I would in the United States. I’d throw Canada on top of that.

I suspect that Obamacare will morph into something else because it was a half-measure that didn’t really address current health care issues in this country. I do think its focus on expanding coverage was necessary and beneficial if the policy decision has been made (as it was) to continue to use employer-provided, privately insured health benefits as the backbone of the national approach. I’ve worked enough with insurance in other private sector activities to know that expansion of the risk pool is the key to controlling costs, and costs are an enormous problem in the American health care system.

To change the subject just a bit before I doze off, why do you consider Wikipedia a “leftist” entity? I thought the problem with Wikipedia was not that it was necessarily “leftist” but that contributors can pretty much say anything (I’ve seen some doozies, although they usually get sorted out over time), whether they be “leftists”, “rightists”, drunks or pranksters.

Beyond that, if Wikipedia is a “leftist” institution, why would you conclude that I, an old-line conservative Republican, would find it particularly palatable or appealing?

You say the most astounding things. You evidence unawareness that Wikipedia is leftist, when it comes to any topics upon which the left-right political spectrum has bearing. Anyone can make an edit; if unpalatable to the left, it is quickly reverted. This has been true for Wikipedia’s entire history, and individuals set themselves up as guardians of topics to avoid contamination by “old-line conservative” types, as you here state that you were at one point. (That seems to have been a long time ago. Now, you evince the characteristics of a somewhat religious leftist, whose worldview is shaped by left-wing television shows. Perhaps you are not, and are donning a rather peculiar disguise for opaque reasons.)

Adding even more massive bureaucracy to the already bloated healthcare system is no one’s real idea of “controlling costs.” The conservative approach is to help the people who need it with the minimum damage done to the rest of the system, while crafting an exit plan. The statist approach, which you explicitly favor, is to interject the state as the permanent source and control of this large portion of the economy.

You’ve been convinced that this the shutdown was Ted Cruz’s decision, and even convinced that he “knew it wasn’t going to work”) but this seems to be merely evidence of where your views originate. Cruz had no such authority; the man who said “I will not negotiate!” does, and planned this long in advance.

Remember Obama’s petulant behavior when he decided to shut the government down rather than delay the individual mandate for a year? Obama, during the shutdown, went out of his way to deny Americans access to institutions and services (and even their own homes!) with some link to federal control, even if it would cost money to deny Americans access. Now, the entirety of healthcare is falling under federal control. The next shutdown gives the statists more leverage yet.

I think I used the present tense to describe myself as an old-line conservative Republican, Keith. We can both go back and check. Wikipedia can get a bit ping-pongy on certain subjects as various partisans from all points of the compass vie for having the last word on entries. But it isn’t any more manipulable by “leftists” than it is “rightists” or “middleists”.

They are astounding only in the artificial, terrarium-like atmosphere of a site like this. In a reality-based environment, my positions are sometimes incorrect, but not irrational or surprising. They work rather well in a context of complex policy trade-offs that rear their head in a populous, heterogeneous democracy.

By the way, I don’t defend Obamacare. I have only criticized it. My criticisms differ from your criticisms. Having studied the issue in some depth, I can say that I may be wrong about some of my misgivings, but I have, at least, started from the position of thinking that the absence of an effective, competitive health system is a threat to the economic security of the United States.

My traditional Republican Conservatism is based on Burke and Kirk (neat how that rhymes, isn’t it?), with a dose of Goldwater. I realize that this is old-fashioned, but, then again, I’m an old guy.

No answers to my questions? It seems you have learned to do what politicians (not statesmen) do. When the question becomes uncomfortable, you deflect the question.

As stated, there is a certain amount of truth in what you say. We call it a half-truth. Insurance companies do have a major role in our healthcare, and at the expense of patient health some have encouraged politicians to ensure the profitability of their companies. Thus, we have reached the point where health insurance companies have essentially become government contractors.

We still retain an increasingly flimsy facade of consumer choice, but as government control increases, we will see more and more the ill-effects of crony capitalism. Yet it seems you seem to think the solution is still more government control, and we are suppose to think that makes you an old-line Conservative. Sorry, but support for big government healthcare just makes you foolish, not a Conservative.

There is no credit to being a comedian, when you have the whole Government working for you. All you have to do is report the facts. I don’t even have to exaggerate. — Will Rogers

Some people have to vote for the government to do the “funny” things it does, but we do not call those people Conservatives. Conservatives may sometimes make funny messes of their own lives, but they don’t feel compelled to use the government to make everyone else look equally foolish. The people who do that we call Democrats.

I think my comment was responsive. I challenged the premise of your question that government is “in charge” of health care. I do not recall advocating more government control, although I might get behind a government funded reading comprehension course for you. I think it would save a great deal of time. To your last paragraph, conservatives don’t generally think government does everything well, although they don’t dismiss the idea that there may be a few matters of general national interest that are within the federal government’s constitutional powers. However, I can’t imagine that anyone, conservatives like me, or conservatives like you, or liberals, leftists or centrists, “feel compelled to use the government to make everyone else look foolish.” It seems that making each other look foolish is still very much a private enterprise kind of activity.

scout – Your effort assert the insurance industry, instead of the government, is in charge of healthcare speaks for itself. When people can get “insurance” for a preexisting condition, that by definition it is not insurance. Government regulation has so fundamentally altered the business model employed by the health insurance industry that the industry no longer exists.

Since the government can now require us to buy “health insurance,” what was the insurance industry now functions as a tax collector. Because these tax collectors also redistributes funds to health care providers according to government regulations, health insurance retains the form without being in substance what it once use to be.

I don’t see this as conceptually different than the fact that the government makes me buy car insurance.

My own view (obviously just one man’s opinion) is that much of what’s wrong with the health care system in America is that we have foisted off the responsibility for providing insurance on private employers. This system grew up topsy-turvy after WWII and has become embedded in the society. So many people make so much money off of it (their name is legion, but the insurance companies are right up there) that it appears that one can never fundamentally change it. Even Obamacare picked up on conservative hostility to Hillarycare and dared not do anything beyond working around the edges of that system by applying Heritage Foundation fixes from the 1990s. Mind you, this is a system that has delivered over the past several decades exorbitant costs, spotty coverage and substandard quality of care results. Hard to see what’s good about it. As an employer who has had to fund employees’ insurance, I resent the government’s (particularly the politicians’) absence of good ideas on this front, because it is, a national problem of the highest order. I haven’t seen anyone with any potential for doing anything about it making much sense on this issue, despite the fact that the problem has been right out in the open for at least a quarter of a century.

Where the free market is allowed to operate in medical care (such as in LASIK surgery), costs have come down tremendously and quality has improved, driven by technology and the fact that people can make choices. Where governments take control and remove people from the payment decisions, as happened years ago with health insurance commissions and agencies, choices are reduced, and prices have gone up.

When the government injects itself, it is blatantly wasteful and inefficient. Not only does it not care about “profit” or “savings,” bureaucracies in our system are rewarded for overspending by being given increased budgets.

Every possible bad aspect of government-run systems, from waste to lack of expertise to solving the wrong problems to petty bureaucracies to arbitrary rule-making, has been combined in Obamacare. Sadly, this was intentional, but intentional or not it remains a horrific idea.

By the way, before the counterpoints start coming in, the reason we require everyone to buy auto insurance is that risktakers who go without and do bodily injury or property damage foist those responsibilities off on the larger population. The costs are borne somewhere. Human nature being what it is, we, as a society acting through political mechanisms have told the risktakers among us that they must do their minimal share by having insurance inplace or paying into state funds to offset their carelessness. This is a way of mitigating the old “tragedy of the Common” problem.

Health insurance is no different. If people go without health insurance for whatever reason (be it as straightforward and forgivable as poverty or as reckless as feckless risktaking) they push their health costs inequitably on those who do act responsibly. It is for this reason that I have not the slightest problem with our saying that not participating in minimization of that risk is unacceptable within this polity.

This point goes back to one that you discuss here frequently, if not with constant clarity – the nature of man. Much of government involves a societal effort to prevent fallible (Christians would say sinful) human behaviors from having overly broad impacts on those who act responsibly.

The US Constitution gives the United States government no authority at all to require Americans to purchase automobile insurance.

And therefore, IT DOES NOT REQUIRE THIS. This decision is up to individuals states, and by amusing irony you are writing to a person who lives in one of the US states that does NOT require auto insurance.

Individual states may decide this. The national government has no authority to force you to buy a product such as auto insurance. And as you said, “Health insurance is no different.”

Auto risk requirements, by the way, only apply to people who have voluntarily decided to purchase a car, in states where this is a requirement. Health risk applies to every living person, even the unborn.

In this country, people who are not insured get emergency care if needed. It is covered mostly by the states through collected taxes, but simply shifting the taxpayer burden from paying for their care directly to paying for their insurance which funds their care doesn’t reduce the taxpayer burden. If it did, no insurance company could afford to interpose itself in that position.

But the new plan provides subsidized health care to millions more than before. It (in theory, though the plan designs are bad) protects individuals from catastrophic losses based upon their own decisions not to buy insurance — but this was never the government’s responsibility to do.

There was a small issue of pre-existing conditions for a small subset of people not covered through group plans, which have covered pre-existing conditions for many years. Those not currently covered could have had state-assisted groups formed for the purpose, a decision up to the citizens of each state. But even a national solution to this would have been a simple fix.

Instead, we’ve built a $20 solution to a ten-cent problem, and created a Constitutional crisis and invested the US government in the control of a multi-trillion-dollar revenue stream that they will not voluntarily give up.

Scout – Since Keith answered you quite well, except one detail. I don’t have much to add. Because redistributing the wealth is stealing, charity is not a function of government. Yet even if it were moral, government provided charity does not work. Whenever government provides charity, there is no love in it. History has shown politicians just use the power to corrupt the electorate and buy their support. Charity only works when those who have decide on their own that have an obligation to help those who have not.

That said, are they exceptions? Perhaps. Natural disasters and such tend to create circumstance when military resources provide the most effective means to rescue disaster victims. However, for the reasons already stated, sustained government involvement in such situations tends to result in too much fraud, waste, and abuse.

I was addressing Tom’s earlier comment in which he criticized the idea that the Government can require us to buy health insurance. It’s a legitimate issue to question whether that requirement could only be imposed at the state level, as opposed to it being imposed by the national government. The health policy approach now being implemented at the national level skirted the issue by not directly requiring everyone to purchase insurance. People are still free to go “naked”, as they say in the industry. However, if that is their choice, they pay a tax penalty every year. That finesse of the mandatory enrollment issue has passed constitutional muster.

Keith raises a separate point as to whether the national government has constitutional authority to impose taxes against those who don’t enroll. Under current law, it does. Whether this is the optimal policy, or even a good policy, is a fair debate. I have my own views on that which I haven’t ventured for several reasons, one of which is that I’m not sure I know the health care issue well enough to have an intelligent opinion about what the best policy would be. I have never had much doubt, however, that the national government under the Constitution has considerable authority to regulate so important an element of national economic activity and something that has so broad an impact on the security and economic well-being of the United States.

To argue that the Constitution has not change much since the Bill of Rights were passed would, of course, not be truthful. Some of the amendments have significantly added to the power of the Federal Government. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has not used its power of judicial review to restrain the growth of Federal powers as it should have done. Neither have we elected honorable men and women willing to be restrained by their oath of office. Hence, our leaders have slowly rendered the 9th and 10th amendments to the Constitution almost meaningless. Now we are at the point where the last vestiges of our Constitutional protections have begun to fall.

Yet some people still blindly ignore the problem. How we can be so willfully ignorant? We have no excuse — except for the sad fact we have an inclination to sin. To know Obamacare is not constitutional does not require advanced degrees, years of experience, or black robes. We merely have to read the Constitution and know a bit of history. And if we have read the Federalist Papers, so much the better. Therefore, when you say Obamacare has passed constitutional muster, …. 😦 To make such a claim is foolish. You may as well say so long as you don’t get caught it is okay to steal.

The Court sometimes makes mistakes and I certainly don’t agree with everything it does. However, the constitutional system of having a court to make these calls strikes me as a sound one, much better than an individual citizen, in this case our host Citizen Tom, substituting his judgement for the reasoning of people who, for all their human faults, are at least somewhat schooled in the history and case law of our Republic and who, because of life tenure, can summon in some measure some objectivity.

By the way, I think the Tenth Amendment probably has more vitality now (i.e., the last twenty years or so) than at almost any time in its existence. I know I have used it to successfully argue against federal and individual incursions on state sovereignty and know of a few other cases with similar results. The Ninth Amendment, which you also mention, is a bit of an enigma, at least in terms of practical impact. There is very little guidance on its application.

Of course, I reject your premise that Obamacare is unconstitutional because it is theft. If it were theft, it might violate some local ordninances, but the Constitution seems not to address the subject directly. Perhaps you feel that it is a taking of property without due process of law, and hence violative of the Fifth Amendment. I would think that the process by which it became law would be deemed sufficient to pass constitutional muster under the Fifth.

You make much about saying little with many words, but what did you say?
1. The Supreme Court is more qualified to judge Constitutional issues than Citizen Tom.
2. Scout is a lawyer. So Scout is more qualified to judge Constitutional issues than Citizen Tom.
3. Obamacare passed Constitutional muster. So Obamacare is not theft.

Here is the 9th Amendment.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Doesn’t each of us have the right to earn a living and to spend what we earn as we wish? Where in the Constitution is the Federal Government empowered to tell us what we must buy?

Here is the 10th Amendment.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

As the 10 Amendment makes perfectly clear, the Constitution lists the powers of Congress. Where does the Constitution empower the Federal Government to run a heathcare system?

You have a habit of starting a response to my comments by grossly mischaracterizing what I have said. I give you the benefit of the doubt by concluding that you have some sort of reading comprehension impediment. The only alternative would be that you deliberately distort my positions to evade the point of my comments.

You attribute to me three points, two of which are false and one of which is probably valid, but not in the manner you state it. Yes, I do think that the Constitutional practice of having the Supreme Court rule on the validity of Executive or Congressional measures is preferable to having random individuals, be they Tom or Scout or anyone else, make those decisions. That is a system that has more often worked well than badly and I would not substitute it for one in which you or I got to make those calls. Of course, you and I (and everyone else) has opinions about Supreme Court rulings, but that’s another issue and not particularly remarkable or relevant to our discussion.

I do not think it essential that one be a lawyer to understand these constitutional disputes, although it can be a tremendous leg up in grasping the background of particular decisions. The Law is a big field and there are any number of very competent lawyers whose practices have never taken them near these issues. It is quite possible that the man who paints my house has a better take on certain constitutional issues than the lawyer who writes my will. There are certainly academics who have never practiced law or taken a bar exam who have a deep and detailed understanding of the constitutional law of the United States. So I am not saying that the fact that I am a lawyer makes my view superior to yours. I am saying, however, that my practice of law, a practice that at times takes me into the constitutional realm, informs my opinion and, when my opinion is expressed or evaluated by others, it is relevant to the quality of that opinion that I have wrestled with some of these issues at all levels of the federal court system.

That Obamacare passes constitutional muster does not mean that it may not violate some local ordinances against theft (theft being a state and local issue). However, it would be unusual that a federal law that is valid under the Constitution would be held to be a criminal act because it violates some local ordinance.

Well, Boehner is not a Conservative, but is he a tool of Satan? Except for Christ Jesus, I suspect of all us have succumbed to Satan at least once, but I will leave it to God to judge who has willing served as Satan’s tools. I don’t need that job.

When it is sufficient to say we need to replace Boehner with someone we believe will serve the Conservative cause, why should we try to judge the man? That job God has claimed for Himself.

I agree. We risk alienating those who would be allies by trying to turn simple enemies into demons. Boehner is an “enemy” in the sense that he works against the interests of Constitutional conservatives, and is a weak, vain fellow was actually was fairly conservative in his younger (fresh into Washington) days. The corruption of Washington DC is difficult to resist; look at the corrosive effects the place has had on Paul Ryan in the last couple of years.

It is a place that doles out power and control in return for obedience to the those with the ladle. It takes a strong person indeed to remain independent, knowing that the machinery of an entire bureaucratic behemoth is geared to spit him out of the place like a poisonous berry. So far as we know, Ted Cruz has been successful in his resistance to these forces.

And the forces are not superhuman, nor demonic, however much the proprietors of the place and their minions tend to demonize us. No, they are simply humans, molded by a system that rewards people for bad behavior.

But they are not good people; they are not automatically worthy of respect and admiration; only a few are — and they are too few indeed. Most are “go along to get along” types who simply fill seats on the merry-go-round while the machinery spins it around, and they will depart having contributed nothing of substance.

John Boehner, leader of the “conservative revolution” in Congress decades ago, could be a key player now. But he isn’t; the “machine” (the system of rewards and demands, currently led by people much closer to the definition of evil) are playing him instead.

Let’s get rid of him. And all of those who, while ostensibly on our side, are not acting to advance the cause of liberty and preserve this most extraordinary Constitutional republic.

For the most part, I agree. I just observe what Ephesians 6:10-20 attests. In our battles we do fight the Devil. We do need the strength of God. We just don’t need to call other people tools of Satan.

The MAD Jewess is, as her monicker suggests, a Jew. So I would imagine the Old Testament holds more weight with her. So I can only guess how she might regard this passage, but this is where I am coming from.

Matthew 7:1-6 English Standard Version (ESV)
Judging Others

7 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. 3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

6 “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.

Because we must avoid giving what is holy to dogs and pearls to pigs, we must judge the people we choose to lead us. However, we can only judge the actions of our fellow human beings. We cannot judge hearts. Yet that is sufficient. We do not have to give wrongdoers power over us. We do not have to give dogs what is holy or throw pearls before pigs.

Agreed. We are agreed John B. needs to be replaced. What we don’t need to do is harm ourselves by hating the man. It is sufficient to hate what we have done by electing such men and women.

In Romans 3:9-20, the Apostle Paul quotes a string of verses from the Old Testament. His point is that no man is good. Not one. When we are not obedient to God, we end up with leaders like John B, a leader who does not do what we need him to do. Because he is an elected official, John B. must be doing what the people who voted for him want him to do, but he is not doing what we need him to do.

Our fellow Americans put John B. and people like him in power. Why? Think about it. Then ask yourself this question. Are we going to hate them all, or are we going to pray for them and ourselves?

Since vengeance belongs to the Lord, I think it my job to stand for what is good. If that puts me in the position of opposing evil and evil people, then so be it. Nonetheless, it is evil I hate. The people God will judge.

I would agree God hates evildoers. However, God can see into our hearts. He knows what we cannot know. Moreover, when I think of what awaits someone God hates….

Thank you for the Christmas cheer. I hope you enjoy that beautiful Jewish Holiday that comes this time of year as well.

Psalm 130 Good News Translation (GNT)
A Prayer for Help

130 From the depths of my despair I call to you, Lord.
2 Hear my cry, O Lord;
listen to my call for help!
3 If you kept a record of our sins,
who could escape being condemned?
4 But you forgive us,
so that we should stand in awe of you.

5 I wait eagerly for the Lord’s help,
and in his word I trust.
6 I wait for the Lord
more eagerly than sentries wait for the dawn—
than sentries wait for the dawn.

7 Israel, trust in the Lord,
because his love is constant
and he is always willing to save.
8 He will save his people Israel
from all their sins.

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts.” Ronald Reagan.